Zippo Patents Shape of Its Lighters

Published 7:00 pm, Sunday, February 23, 2003

The Zippo lighter is easily recognizable: a rectangular metal shell with beveled edges and a gently curved flip-top.

That simple design is just as easy to copy, and Zippo Manufacturing Co., which has been making the popular lighters for more than 70 years, wants that to stop.

The lighter's shape now registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the company has been moving against makers of imitations and pressing retailers to get the knockoffs off the shelves. The company is telling manufacturers and vendors of copycat products to stop by June 30 or face legal action.

"If you see that shape, you say, 'Zippo,'" said Jeff Duke, in-house legal counsel for the company founded by George D. Blaisdell in 1932. "It's much more than just registering a square metal box."

At two solid ounces, the Zippo's smooth, cool heft feels good in the hand. It comes with a guarantee to fix it for free at the headquarters in Bradford, about 130 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, for as long as the lighter survives.

Zippo has produced about 375 million lighters since 1932 and now churns out about 12 million a year. The company boasts some four million collectors, and it encourages them with lighters sheathed with gold or scrimshaw and decorated with drawings and symbols, commemorating football teams, moon landings, race car drivers and cartoon characters that chronicle much of the 20th century. Many people remember the old Zippos their fathers and grandfathers carried.

One dealer in Bergen County, N.J., Ira Pilossof, says he sold an original 1933 lighter for some $20,000 a few years ago.

Zippo's classic shape actually came into being in 1942; earlier versions were more boxy. Efforts to register it began in the late 1980s, when officials noted a slew of imitators hitting the market. Former marketing and sales vice president James Baldo decided the company _ which was also seeing more interest in the lighters as collectibles _ needed to better protect its brand.

During the 1990s, the company sought trademark protection in several nations, and has won in countries from Cuba to Finland and Israel to Vietnam. The process of getting U.S. protection began in 1994, and ended successfully just last year.

According to Duke, many of the knockoffs are made in China. Although some are branded with names like "Zipp" or "Zipo," some owners only discover they are fake when they send them to Zippo to be repaired. Zippo sends them back unfixed.

Duke said one competitor _ Ronson International Ltd. _ objected to the shape registration but later withdrew its objection, agreeing to change the design of one of its lighters reminiscent of the classic Zippo. Ronson officials in New Jersey did not return calls for comment.

To register something as simple as a small metal box, an applicant must prove the design is either inherently distinctive or that the public is so attuned to the shape that it is quickly recognized, according to Jessie Marshall, an attorney with the Patent and Trademark Office. A classic example is the Coca-Cola bottle.

Another part of the equation, said Ann Dunn Wessberg, a trademark lawyer for Faegre & Benson in Minneapolis, is that the shape not be important to the item's function or production _ so that copyrighting it won't stifle competition.

Zippo says knockoffs consume as much as 30 percent of their business. It has asked its salesmen and regional representatives to look out for imitations and spread the word that they are trademark violations. If polite requests fail, suits and even seizures could follow. The company says it has had some knockoffs confiscated in Europe.

Initially, the company tried to trademark another feature of the Zippo, and then dropped the effort. So for now, other lighter manufacturers don't have to worry if their products have that same, sharp Zippo click when they open.